


And the damage makes you want to hide

by Emjen_Enla



Series: Prompted Works [22]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (Ish) - Freeform, (again), Alternate Universe - Wings, Angst, Book 4: The Raven King, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, F/M, Gen, I love this trope but I never thought I'd be using it on Gansey, Other, Secrets, There was supposed to be comfort but then it just didn't happen, Wing Grooming, Wingfic, Wings, all angst no comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-06 05:04:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20285866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emjen_Enla/pseuds/Emjen_Enla
Summary: Gansey has wings. No one knows, and that's the way he likes it. Written for Gansey Week day 6 "Wings."





	And the damage makes you want to hide

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Wings" by Casey Lee Williams for the Rwby soundtrack.
> 
> Welcome to what might be one of the weirdest AUs in this fandom. I think this one might manage to actually stick to the prompt though, so that’s good.
> 
> Let the record show that it really frustrates me that we don’t know Mrs. Gansey’s first name.
> 
> Warnings: Blood, a lot of ignorant opinions about mental illness

The wings appeared three weeks after Richard Gansey III’s first death. Actually, that was not quite true. They probably started growing the moment he was resurrected, it just took them three weeks to first break the skin.

It was a very gruesome happening, worthy of a place in a horror movie. Gansey woke in the middle of the night in horrible pain. He got out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom attached to his room. When he pulled off his shirt he could see the outline of something dark beneath his skin. He only had time for a strangled gasp before huge, black wings ripped through the skin on his back, spraying blood all over him and the room.

When the first jet black feathers pushed through Gansey’s back slick with blood, Gansey almost screamed and ran for his parents. Three weeks before he probably would have, but in the weeks since his death things had changed. When he’d first come back to life and stumbled back to the party, skin still covered in welts from enough stings to kill someone who wasn’t allergic to hornets, Glendower was all he could talk about.

“A voice said that I was going to live because of Glendower,” he’d told his father over and over. “Who’s Glendower?”

“I don’t know, Dick,” Richard Gansey II had said, throwing a desperate pleading look over his shoulder to Gansey’s mother. Mrs. Gansey was in the middle of calling 911. Her voice was high with terror and her hands were shaking. That was the scariest thing about the whole situation. All other things aside, Mrs. Gansey was a politician as iron-spined as they came; Gansey had never seen her anything less than perfectly in control.

An ambulance rushed Gansey to the hospital, but there was nothing for the doctors to do. Richard Campbell Gansey III, ten years old and deathly allergic to all types of bees, had been stung hundreds of times and somehow he was still alive and mostly well. There was no explanation.

“It’s a miracle,” one of the nurses had told Gansey’s parents. “You should say prayers of thanks.” Mr. and Mrs. Gansey had just nodded; neither of them were particularly religious, though they went through the motions for the sake of Mrs. Gansey’s political career.

After all the tests there had been the therapist. Gansey had gone on an epic Googling spree while in the hospital so by this point he knew who Owen Glendower was--if reading his Wikipedia page could be calling knowing about him, something high-school aged Gansey would later doubt. He was more than happy to tell the therapist all about the voice and Glendower. “I need to find him,” he’d finished. “I need to ask him why he saved me.”

He’d expected the therapist to believe him, but instead the man had explained that when people almost died they sometimes saw things which weren’t actually there. “Glendower had nothing to do with what happened to you,” the therapist told Gansey in the sickly patronizing voice some people used on children. “It was just a hallucination. It wasn’t real.”

In much later--read as, college--years, when he finally did research on the diagnoses that therapist gave him, Gansey would know that the man had not been impling Gansey was crazy. The problem was that ten-year-old Gansey didn’t know that. He’d grown up around adults who talked about how mental illnesses were overdiagnosed, how mental healthcare was drugging up perfectly normal people instead of teaching them how to deal with their problems, and how ADHD had just been made up to medicialize elementary school kids who didn’t sit still in class. When one of Gansey’s sets of grandparents--Dick Gansey I and the grandmother he would later describe as “bald and racist”--found out Gansey was seeing a therapist they’d had an hour long argument with his parents. They thought he couldn’t hear, but he could and therefore knew that the argument contained gems like “I can’t believe you’re taking him to see a shrink like a lunatic! There’s nothing wrong with him!”

Suffice to say, at the age of ten, Gansey was convinced that the therapist was going to tell his parents that he was crazy and should be locked away. The wings only made it worse. No one believed him about Glendower so what if he told them about this and they didn’t believe him either? What if they couldn’t see the wings at all? Then they would know Gansey was crazy and that would be it.

No one could ever know about the wings, Gansey decided. He’d make sure no one found out and he’d make sure no one thought he’d be crazy. Then he’d be safe and everything would be okay.

At age ten Gansey had never kept a real secret from his parents. He had always been a good kid. The bookish sort of child who got described using words like “charming,” “precocious” and “gifted.” The less flattering descriptors, things like “eccentric,” “strange” and--on one memorable occasion which lead to Helen punching one of their great-uncles in the face-- “not all there” didn’t come along until he hit puberty. At the age of ten, Gansey was a perfect child, and perfect children did not hide things from their parents, but Gansey was going to do it anyway.

That night he scrubbed the bathroom from top to bottom with the cleaning supplies the maid kept under the sink until not a spot of blood remained. He got in the shower and washed the blood off himself too, using shampoo to clean the feathers of his new wings. He was briefly terrified that he would have to cut the wings off with a kitchen knife or something, but they folded neatly into his body in a way which shouldn’t have been possible, but made them invisible when he was wearing a shirt. When he and the room were clean, he bundled all the runed clothes and towels and carpets up and snuck them out to the dumpster behind the house. That left the problem of how to replace all that stuff, but luckily Gansey knew where the housekeeper kept the key to the basement room where they kept spares of such things just for emergency. He knew that eventually someone would do inventory and realize things were missing, but hopefully that could be long after the garbage truck came and took the evidence away.

When everything was as back to normal as he could make it, he collapsed into his bed to snatch what miniscule amount of sleep he still could between the fast-approaching dawn and his nightmares. When he got up the next morning, he was tired but he lied and said that he had slept fine. When his mother asked how he was feeling he lied and said he was feeling good. When he went to the therapist, he lied and said that he’d realized the thing about Glendower was a hallucination, and lied and said anything else he thought might make the man happy. When he came home he kept lying. He lied and lied and lied, and got better and better at lying. He learned what he needed to say to keep people happy and not worrying about him, and he said them. He learned to be everything that he was supposed to be. He learned how to seem perfect again.

No one ever seemed to notice that it was all a lie.

~~~~

Monmouth Manufacturing was empty which meant it was time for a routine Gansey dreaded.

Actually, it could barely be called a routine because it happened so infrequently these days. There had been a time when Gansey had done this every night, but that had been a long time ago. Over the years, he’d begun to do it less and less. He’d always told himself it was because he was getting busier, or didn’t have the room, or because he had roommates who might see, but he knew it was really because he didn’t want to see them and he didn’t want to think about them.

The wings were still there, just as they had been since he was ten. Actually, they were bigger than they’d been before, having grown with him. Gansey had done a lot of reading on the subject and he knew that scientifically these wings were not anywhere near big enough to lift his weight, but they were also too big to fit as snuggly against his back as they did, so he was pretty sure the laws of physics didn’t apply to them.

Not that he would know, because he’d never tried to fly.

But that was not what the routine was for. The routine was necessary to make sure he was not discovered.

Gansey’s wingspan was too big for the bathroom in Monmouth, so when he needed to spread his wings he had to do it in the main room. However, he obviously had to make sure no one would walk in and see him when he did it, so he had to wait for those rare moments when no one was around and he knew they wouldn’t be back for some time. Today was one of those days. Ronan was out keeping Adam company at work, Blue was dog walking and Noah had already appeared today which with the way things were going meant he probably wouldn’t be back today. It was the perfect time.

Once Gansey was absolutely certain he was alone he made his way to his bed and stripped his polo shirt off. He knew that if he had a mirror, he’d be able to see the wings tucked impossibly tightly against his back. It had been years and he was still shocked that they were that easy to hide. The only way to make them really visible through clothes was to slouch, so Gansey simply didn’t slouch. As long as he did that and didn’t take his shirt off for anything, he was perfectly safe.

It had been weeks since the last time he had spread his wings and they’d long since gone numb from lack of motion. He started with the left one, opening it carefully mostly with his hands. His nose wrinkled in disgust at the sight of the extra appendage. When he’d first gotten them they’d been terrifying but beautiful and powerful. Now years of being closed firmly against his back for the vast majority of the time had ruined them. They were attrofied and dull-colored and over the last year or so most of the flight feathers had fallen out. They were hideous. 

Logically, Gansey knew that keeping the wings closed all the time was not good for them and that if he’d just actually use them they would become stronger, the feathers would grow back and they’d be beautiful again, but he couldn’t. Even in a place as out of the way and special as Henrietta, a boy with raven wings would not go unnoticed. Recently he kept catching himself going back to the “cut the wings off with a bread knife” idea even though he knew he would bleed to death if he tried that. 

He massaged the stiff joints of the wing until it loosened up enough for him to cautiously flap it. Back when he still had flight feathers, he had to be careful not to knock things over with the sheer force of the air displaced when he flapped, but that was much easier to avoid now. Several more feathers came loose and settled to the floor as he moved. He’d pick those up and throw them away when he was done, but now that Ronan had Chainsaw he didn’t have to be as careful because the other boy would just assume all random raven feathers were hers. The flight feathers were slightly more of a problem because they were so big, but there were so few of them left. 

Once the wing was somewhat loosened up, he swung it forward and began checking the feathers, removing the dead ones and straightening the bent ones and making sure everything was as in order as possible. He hated the way they felt. He washed them as best he could whenever he showered, but they needed a thorough clean which was impossible in Monmouth’s tiny shower. A thorough clean would be difficult in his shower at his parents house these days. The feathers felt greasy and gross and sick.

Logically he knew things could not go on like this. He knew that things were only going to get worse if he didn’t make a change, but he didn’t. At this point, he reasoned, it didn’t matter anyway. He was going to be dead in a matter of months, probably before anything really horrible happened on this front.

When he moved on to the right wing, he found it in worse shape than the other. It was missing all the fight feathers accept for one damaged and twisted one. He tried to be as gentle with it as he could, but when he tried to straighten it out it came loose in his hand. 

He stared down at the dead feather in his hand and suddenly and dramatically burst into tears. They were tears that had been building up slowly over the last few months as he grew closer and closer to the April 24th deadline for his second and real death, but they were also tears for the years of fear which had gotten him to this place. His wings should have been a joy, he would have loved to fly under his own power and he was sure he friends would have admired them in their healthy state, but it was too late. They were so ruined that the thought of showing them to anyone filled him with shame. He never wanted his friends to see the wings like this. 

The worst part was that he knew that no matter what he did, they would see. Once he was dead he would not be able to keep any more secrets. His friends, and his parents and everyone else would know. He’d probably make at least the local news given how famous his mother was these days. Everyone would look at his body with it’s disgusting, atrophied wings and know was he really was: a ruined boy hiding behind a mask of normality. He hated it, but there was nothing to be done unless Ronan spontaneously dreamed something to keep someone from bleeding to death while they performed home amputation on their extra limbs. He was going to be found out. 

His cell phone began to ring. Gansey lifted his head out of his comforter, unsure of how long he’d been lying face down on his bed crying. Embarrassed that he’d spent so long feeling sorry for himself when others had it far worse, Gansey snaked his arm across the bed and snatched up his phone. The Caller ID announced Blue’s name—Gansey had put the home phone at 300 Fox Way into his phone under her name. Gansey sat up and took a deep if slightly unsteady breath in an attempt to balance himself. His wings moved just a little and he folded them back into his body both so he didn’t have to see them out of the corners of his eyes and to feel more like the Gansey that Blue knew. When he felt he could wait no longer he answered the phone. 

“Hello?”

“Hi, Gansey,” Blue said from the other side. She sounded like she was having a good day. Gansey squashed the jealousy which rose up inside him. “Are you busy this afternoon?”

“No,” Gansey said. He wasn’t quite done checking over his wings but given that he’d just spent some unknown amount of time sobbing because he’d lost a flight feather, he figured now was as good a time as any to stop. “Why are you asking? Aren’t you supposed to be out walking dogs?”

“Mrs. Boyle says that the pavement is too hot for Muffins’ delicate paws,” Blue snorted. “The pavement’s not hot at all, but I’ll take any excuse not to have to walk the Demon Dog. Anyway, I finished early; do you want to hang out?”

In spite of everything Gansey’s heart leaped at the idea of spending more time with Blue. The pain and fear that surrounded the wings faded away. If Blue came over he’d be able to forget all about them for a couple hours. “Yes, I do,” he said, hopefully not so quickly that he seemed desperate. “Ronan’s hanging out with Adam at work so it will just be the two of us.”

“Alright,” Blue said. It was impossible to tell from her tone of voice if she was excited by the idea of spending time alone with Gansey. Gansey hoped she was excited by the idea of spending time alone with him. “I’ll be right over.”

“I look forward to seeing you,” Gansey said. When they hung up he sat in the middle of the bed for a minute before forcing himself up and reaching for his polo shirt. 

He had to make sure there was no trace of feathers by the time Blue arrived.


End file.
